Ruined
by Indoctrinated
Summary: He was ruined, destroyed, and all because of one insignificant, impossibly wonderful, stupid, beautiful, idiotic, brilliant, cheeky to the last, completely irreplaceable human. Implied TenRose.


A/N: Well, this is one of those fics where I have the opportunity to continue it if I ever choose to, but I'm not sure if this is the right direction to take the idea I have for this particular introduction. I might eventually change this to complete and leave it as a stand-alone, but for now I'll leave it open ended, just in case. It's kinda dark, and very angsty, but I've been having an angsty past few weeks so I guess it's only appropriate.

Disclaimer: I think I'll leave the claiming of ownership rights to Doctor Who for someone else, 'cause it's definitely not me.

* * *

Rose was gone. It was a simple as that, a fact that could in no way be ignored. She had become yet another fact in his life, an irrefutable piece of evidence that could in no way be altered or changed. It was truth, it was reality. The Doctor was full of useless facts, a literal encyclopedia of information on everything in the universe, and yet nowhere in all that knowledge was the one answer that he wanted. There was no way back. Once sealed, the rift that allowed travel between the universe he was stuck in and the alternate universe Rose was trapped in was so large in magnitude that it could only be re-opened with a massive explosion of cosmic energy. The detonation would surely shred the fragile fabric that separated the two separate universes and suck them both into the Void.

But Rose being gone was a fact he had gotten used to a long time ago. It had been years, and his god-cursed internal clock that all Time Lords have knew the exact date and time, down to the last second, of when she had been lost. For him it had been eight years, twenty-seven weeks, sixteen days, seven hours, fifty-eight minutes and forty-two seconds. He could close his eyes and almost hear the irritating _tick-tick-tick_ of his timekeeper, his jailor, his master. Time was not something he could control or could bend to his will, Time was merely something that used him as a pawn – gave him the tools and the knowledge to be swept along for the ride. He was but one player in a greater cosmic game of chess, a game he had never intended to lose. But what use is there in winning when the one prize you strain for, the one thing you want the most and everything you have left to live for has been stripped from you? Gone were his family, his friends, his loved ones, his home. All of them had left at one time or another, got on with their lives or had died, perishing in the War or by other means, and not all of them painless and quick. Except one. The one who was determined to give up _everything_ for him. Her family, her friends, even a second chance with the father she had never known. All of it for _him_. _She_ was what he wanted, and yet she was the one thing that was denied to him forever.

But maybe the way things happened was for the better. Either way, his heart would be broken, and either way, he'd be alone, again. It didn't matter if she had stayed or left; in the end he'd be lonely. Maybe loneliness was his lot in life. After all, it was his choice to have purposely distanced himself from the other Time Lords. His decisions had ultimately led him to here, alone again in the TARDIS, brooding over what once was and could never be again.

Immediately after the loss he had tried to fill the space that was left in his heart. Donna, Martha, Jack and several others were all given a chance. None fit right; none of them were big enough or were the size or shape or had the same laugh or the same smile to correctly fill the gaping hole in his heart. And after awhile they had all left to get on with their lives, and so joined the steadily growing ranks of companions that left behind bits of themselves with him. His grief progressed. He grew tired of trying to fill the hole and decided instead to try and forget it, hoping that sooner or later he might forget about Rose all together, or maybe it would at least heal into a scar and blend in with the scores of similar marks already crisscrossing his heart. Years passed as he traveled the universe alone, wandering aimlessly, and no healing occurred. He never took a new companion. His days of attempting to fill the hole were over, and sharing the TARDIS with someone who was not the one who fit right only made the ache worse.

He had often heard humans describe heartache over losing someone they loved, and he had always thought it was just a metaphor for describing how miserable they felt about losing a loved one. He had no idea that what they were describing was just about as accurate as is possible. Everytime he thought about Rose, his chest ached and contracted painfully, his breath came in short, wrenching gasps. Sometimes it was a sweeter ache, but far more often it was a sharp, acute pain that twisted knives of unexplainable agony into his chest. When these aches had first begun he searched endlessly for a medical reason, pouring through medical texts in the library and spending days on end in the MedLab, looking for a reason or condition to explain what was wrong with him. He never found one, but that was because – as he finally came to a conclusion – he was suffering from a badly broken heart, and there's not a single doctor in the universe that could prescribe the right cure.

He was ruined, destroyed, and all because of one insignificant, impossibly wonderful, stupid, beautiful, idiotic, brilliant, cheeky to the last, completely irreplaceable human.

Back in the TARDIS, still brooding over the last eight years, twenty-seven weeks, sixteen days, eight hours, four minutes and thirty-five seconds, the Doctor leaned back in his chair and whipped his glasses off. He pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers, a resigned sigh blowing past his lips. Brooding wasn't good for his brain, it gave him migraines. It was safer to do in his library were he had stored volume after volume after volume of memories in small data cubes. They were easier to access and far less painful than digging through centuries of jumbled of memories and facts to find just one that he wanted. His encounter with Alexander the Great and the time him and Jack had been stripped naked and nearly hanged, drawn, and quartered after being mistaken as Guy Fawkes and one of his accomplices when they visited early 17th century England was sandwiched between having his lights knocked out by a policeman in 1950's London and, for some strange reason, him singing 'Cupid' aloud while he showered. Nearly a thousand years' worth of memories were a lot to keep track of, even for a Time Lord.

He levered himself out of his favorite chair with a creak of leather and a squeaking protest of chair legs against the metal grate floor. For a moment he stood in the doorway to the hall, one doorway of many that branched off the console room, looking at nothing in particular, just…remembering. Then he stepped into the dimly lit corridor. He quickly arrived at the library and swung through the open door. The large, oval room housed millions of novels, textbooks, plays, poems, maps, and all works of the written word in every language of the universe. It was a close as one could come to a complete collection of everything ever written in the history of the universe. But one shelf in particular had been set aside. It held stacked translucent cubes of every size, ranging from two feet square to no bigger than a grain of rice. They were data cubes that could store any type of information in nearly any format and was universally compatible with almost every possible type of operating system or piece of hardware designed to hold electronic files. They were even compatible with brains, and could wirelessly download memories after the appropriate codes and passwords were entered in order to access the user's mind.

He blindly swiped one off the shelf, hefting it in his right hand and slipping his specs back on with his left. Inside the cube, flashes of color and beams of light started orienting themselves into 3-D projections. These apparitions would tell him what memories were stored inside the cube. A miniature Sarah Jane Smith sprinted through a corridor, his fourth self following closely behind. He shoved the cube back onto the shelf, dismissing it with a casual thought of, _Too early_. He grabbed another, Martha Jones's face grinning in the space instead. _Too late_. He sorted through three more cubes before locating the correct one; the only one that contained his memories of Rose. The familiar aches grew in his chest, but – like Rose – he had long ago become accustomed to them. With a heavy sigh he wandered over to a nearby table and armchair, carefully setting the precious cube on the wood surface. After a few minutes his eyes slowly drifted shut, providing a projection screen for the memories on the insides of his eyelids.

He once recalled telling Martha Jones that he was "better off on his own anyway," but that statement wasn't the full truth. A Time Lord's memories are just as much a part of his family as actual relatives and friends. They keep a Time Lord company during periods of loneliness, which occurs quite often for beings such as themselves; a few thousand years is a long time to consistently have friends or family surrounding them. So, as a result of their long lives, Time Lords had the ability to slip into a waking dream state in which they would reawaken stored memories, and revive them as if living them the first time around.

And now, as he relived his life with Rose - those two years that were far too short - the knives of agony burning into his chest grew to an unbearable level of pain. His eyes watered, tears welling up in the corners, threatening to spill over. He broke out of the dream state with a vehement curse. He wasn't going to cry, dammit. He hadn't cried over her in years and he wasn't going to start again anytime soon. That part of his life was over. He'd never get it back, he'd never have another chance. Mourning its loss now was futile. He had all the time in the world, all the time in the universe to do whatever he wished with, and yet he sat here in a moldering library, an ancient relic among more relics of a sorted past. He was the last Time Lord, and by God, why couldn't he do what he was born to do? The Gallifreyans were the keepers of the universe, the right hand of Time itself, and yet he simply sat here - the last of his kind - reliving a past that couldn't be changed. Memories flew from his mind, these ones not nearly as pleasant as his grinning Rose. It was the War, the Time War, the _last_ Time War to end all others - or so was said. Planets burned and galaxies turned to dust at the wave of a hand or a croaked command, hail storms of fire and plasma burst into land and water and running figures. And all around, no matter where his racing memories took him, the screams of dying things rang in his ears. The piercing cries set his teeth on edge. These memories were as much a part of him as Rose and Martha and Jack and Sarah Jane were, but they were ones he despised. He hated himself sometimes for the things he had done, the blood that was on his hands. And the blood refused to relinquish its hold on him, permanently staining him.

He leapt from his chair, snatching the data cube from the table, and, in a blind rage, prepared to hurl it against the far wall. A venomous sneer skinned his lips back from his teeth, his eyes wild with a vengeful wrath and his breath coming in deep, bestial pants. At the last moment, just as his arm was swinging into the forward arc that would propel the collection of memories at a shattering velocity, he caught himself, body going limp. He couldn't do it, just couldn't destroy a piece of Rose. She was too much a part of him; who he was, why he was, what he was.

After a minute or two of just standing there, gathering himself again and consciously pulling away from the cliff he had nearly thrown himself over, the Doctor calmed his fury. He sighed and pulled his glasses off, tossing them carelessly on a nearby table as he sunk back into the chair. The cube was plunked back down on the table next to his specs. Donna had been right. He needed someone to hold him back, to bring him back from the edge of blind fury every once in awhile.

Unable to quite figure out why he had given into such a primal rage, he leaned forward, hands raking uselessly through his hair, combing it this way and that, tugging, pulling, clenching in unrelieved frustration that burned like a wildfire in the pit of his knotted stomach.

This was his punishment. This guilt was more restraining than and shackle or prison cell. Those could be broken out of and escaped from, but this lived in his mind. It dwelled and festered there, eating away at him day after day, month after month, year after year. And he knew it would continue. This, apparently, was his destiny: The last of the Time Lords, the Oncoming Storm, the lonely wanderer, the man without a home. It was not his first choice, nor his second, not even his third or his fourth and so on. But if this was what the Fates had chosen for him, if this was what he was supposed to do for the rest of his life – the lonely nomad - then he would follow his life's thread until they deemed it necessary for his life to end.

All he wanted was Rose – not forever – just another chance, another try. Maybe he could finally get something right. He sighed, hands tightening in his hair until a thin cry of frustration escaped his lips.

Rose Tyler had ruined him all right, and she had done a damn good job of it.


End file.
